A terrible writer

Not quite news, but news-ish for me: have written a story, and am going to send it out to journals. Wrote this piece for a reading last weekend, which went surprisingly well considering humidity everybody sweated through. Truth be told, may have been because of everybody’s discomfort that I felt so much at ease that [...]

“Better last sentence TK”

I am coding a manuscript for the design department, and the pages are very clean, so far just two elements to code—story title (ST) and space break (#)—which made me think of fiction using only words, that is sans poem or letter extracts, or charts/graphs/pictures/etc., which then made me think of the stupid computerized picture [...]

Social tales

Thursday
Had dinner with one of the writers from the Sunday writing group. We stayed till closing time. She is so lovely and positive. I’m a little in love, and I told her so.
*

A collection

I has it!
Well, it’s on my fingertips.
But truly it’s there—am finally understanding what these stories from the past couple months will amount to.
Now, to write them . . .
It took me four hours earlier tonight to perfect a paragraph. I forget sometimes how tedious my process can be.
Still, at three a.m., plowing on.

Mille grazie, J.

Broke

The accountant asked me: “Do you travel?”
“No.”
“Never?”
I was embarrassed. “I’m visiting my brother in L.A. next month.”
“Let’s say instead that you’re going to a writers’ gathering in May—and while you’re there, hey why not see your brother?”
A writer’s accountant, this. My first.
I showed him one receipt. It was a donation (this my first too) to [...]

A story’s progress

Early Sunday morning, I sat in an east-side Cosí café trying to get a handle on a fragment of a story I was preparing for my writing group. Something clicked around 2:00 p.m., when the foundation at the beginning started to gel. Then I reread the rest of the fragment to see what there was [...]

Slow, slow process

Story needs to be finished for writing group by Sunday, but it’s coming along too slowly. There are many stories within this story. How to make these narratives fit into a single story, and not have them spin out of control into their own separate stories? To focus, I’ve returned to the section that had [...]

I’m a “New York City urban artist”

I got it!
More info later. Gotta give up proof that I live in New York City. Does this blog count?

“Cut and paste the logo, and print out a certificate—you’re a winner!“

Me tired—been up since 5:00 a.m., cramps just hit, am freaked out about my office’s move—but I am done. Story isn’t done, though, nowhere near done, more like still frozen in package, waiting to thaw. But at least 145 pages have been written. Ah, the comfort of numbers, even if they will go down, down, [...]

Late (II)

Oh fuck (scuse my French)—while I’ve been writing like a NaNoWri mofo, deadlines have sailed past me left and right, and I just realized that another one has been missed. I hope the lady who hired me isn’t too pissed, especially as I already have a history of being late with her.* I hope I [...]

Toward the NaNo finish line

J is out of town, work at the office has lightened up, and I just wrote 6,000+ words in four hours, bringing my (dubious) word count to nearly 41,500. It’s very possible that I can finish this fucker in the two days left.

It’s 3:30 a.m. Do you know why your favorite production editor isn’t in [...]

NaNo ramble

I love the pages that point out the Parts of a book—”Part 1″ or “Part I” or simply “I.” And I’ve got three of them in my NaNo piece. I just started the third, which finally goes into detail about the relics the narrator wants to save from the coming floods. Am on a roll, [...]

“Then I see a photograph of us as children.”

(Photograph via.)
*
I dreamed a story this morning. It was about my childhood best friend, MW, and her apartment. I can’t wait to write it. What I’ve noted below makes no sense, however. But I’ll make sure the story makes sense.

MW—large eyes, heart-shaped face, graceful.
Her apartment on Madison Street—cleaned, painted white, sparse.
I stay with her for [...]

I’m a NaNoWri mofo

I much prefer “mofo” on its own, period, but what can you do?
After four-plus days of writing nonstop for the monthlong race of finishing a 50,000-word project, I wanted to check in here to say something, anything, it’s been a while, but note: Words are gone at the moment, me word-numb, frenzied by adrenaline-fueled typing, [...]

“If you light up a cigarette, it’s a comma. If you inhale, it’s an em-dash.”

G’s brilliant explanation to her students regarding the appropriate choice of commas or em-dashes to set off a clause. Move over, Strunk & White.

Random line I wrote down on the same page: For God’s sake, darlin’, don’t do it!